One of the familiar human products of war is the refugee, the resident of a
combat zone set adrift either by anticipated or actual destruction of his home
and means of livelihood. An object of pity as an individual, in the mass he
becomes a menace, clogs roads, imposes potentially ruinous burdens on already
strained civilian services, and spreads panic. The British and French had some
experience with refugees in the 1940 campaign, and it had become accepted Allied
doctrine that the Germans were exceptionally adept at exploiting these
unfortunates for tactical and even strategic advantage.

To the traditional picture of the refugee, the war had by 1944 added another
figure, the displaced person (DP). A refugee was almost always a citizen of the
country in which he was encountered and usually no great distance from home. If
he was a potential threat, he was at least a transitory one. In liberated
territory the local authorities could be expected to take care of him, and in
enemy territory they would be compelled to do so. The DP was a different and
more complex species altogether. He and his fellows had only two characteristics
in common: they would all be citizens of one of the United Nations (by
definition, enemy aliens no matter where they were found could not qualify), and
they would all be outside their national boundaries at the time of liberation.
They were certain in large numbers to be Russians and Poles with some Yugoslavs and Greeks, and
inside Germany would be French, Belgians, and Dutch. They were the result of the
vast transfer of population that Germany had begun in early 1942 to provide
labor for its war industry, farms, and military construction. An Allied agency
had estimated that as of October 1943 there were 21 million displaced persons in
Europe, mainly in Germany or in territory annexed by the Reich.1To the DPs
could be added an indeterminate but large number of what would later come to be
called RAMPS (recovered Allied military personnel): prisoners of war of all
nationalities, many of whom had been held in Germany since the early campaigns
of the war and, if they were soldiers of defeated nations, used as common labor.

Even at a distance and in the abstract, the DPs constituted a towering
problem for SHAEF. Allied propaganda had played heavily on the plight of the
so-called slave laborers, making their liberation and rehabilitation major
United Nations war aims. Persuaded by their own propaganda, which in fact proved
all too true, the military planners assumed that the DPs' first desire at the
moment they realized they were free would be to get away from their German
masters and, if possible, get out of Germany. The human flood thus unloosed
would vastly overshadow the refugee

[52]

problems of the British and French in 1940. Furthermore, the DPs could not be
left for the Germans to control. As victims of nazism and as United Nations
citizens, they would become SHAEF's responsibility. Initially, they would have
to be prevented from hopelessly clogging the armies' routes of advance and
communications; secondly, they would have to be cared for with some solicitude;
finally, they would have to be returned to their homes. The interval between the
first and the last stage might be a long one since it would be determined by the
state of the war, the condition of the European transportation systems, and in
some instances by the people themselves, not all of whom would be able or
willing to return to their home countries.

The DPs, moreover, could not be ignored even briefly or in the heat of
battle, for they might harbor among them a danger to human life, both military
and civilian, that was potentially greater than the war itself-the virus-like
micro-organism Rickettsia. A benign parasite of the body louse, Rickettsia, when
it passes from the feces of a louse into a human body through a bite or opening
in the skin, causes typhus, the most feared epidemic disease in Europe since the
bubonic plague. Napoleon's army in Russia reportedly suffered more losses from
typhus than from combat. During and after World War I, an estimated three
million persons died from the disease in the Balkans and the Ukraine. In World
War II, a thousand cases had been registered in Naples by early 1944. Always
serious and frequently fatal, typhus is endemic in parts of eastern Europe. When
war breaks out it begins to spread; humans carrying the louse, host of the
disease, provide its transportation. The Germans encountered it in their eastern
campaigns, and it was known to have come into Germany with forced laborers and
transports to concentration camps.2

The U.S. government had established the US Typhus Commission in December 1942
to study the disease and devise methods of control.3By early 1944, DDT had been proven highly effective against the louse,
hence indirectly also against the disease; however, it had to be applied individually
and more than once, since it killed the insect but did not affect the eggs.
In a reasonably static population, DDT could in a short time practically wipe
out the disease; in a mass eruption and uncontrolled migration of people, carriers
might still spread it from one end of Europe to the other in a few weeks.

"Displaced Persons" appeared for the first time as a separate branch
of the G-5 in the reorganization of 1 May 1944. (In the Standard Policy and
Procedure the designation "DP" was still regarded as a synonym for
refugee, and pertinent duties were divided among the civil affairs detachments
in the field, the provost marshal, and the local police.)
4 Although nobody then knew what the DPs' full impact on military
government would be, the branch from the beginning was one of two reserved for
a senior US officer (Supply being the other). On 13 May, General Gullion became
branch chief.5

[53]

of man's noblest relic of his past, and what fire and pillage once had done,
the bombers and artillery of World War II could do a thousand times more
completely. In its conception alone, Operation OVERLORD-a massive armed sweep,
with tactical and strategic air support, across northern France and the Low
Countries and into Germany as deep as might be necessary to bring down nazism-made
a strong bid to break all previous records for destructiveness. The war thus far
had not been quite as devastating as anticipated. The art, particularly the
architecture, of Italy was in great danger, but the war there was on nowhere
near the scale contemplated for northwest Europe. In their early campaigns, the
Germans had won rather easily; consequently, they had been careful to spare
valuable art and buildings even in the East. After all, among their topmost
leaders were several admirers and collectors of art. To the Americans and the
British the protection of art and historical monuments had been an entirely
peripheral consideration until they landed in Sicily and Italy in the summer of
1943.

The Italian campaign, however, had revealed the military commanders to be
distinctly unwilling to risk tactical advantage or the lives or welfare of their
troops to protect cultural intangibles. Neither could civilians, in the midst of
a life-or-death ideological struggle, easily urge soldiers in battle to respect
the shrines. Nevertheless, knowledgeable individuals and groups both inside and
outside the government were deeply concerned with at least preventing needless
destruction. In early 1943, the American Defense-Harvard Group and the Committee
on Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas of the American Council of
Learned Societies (ACLS) had begun preparing inventories of European cultural monuments, museums, and private collections. They received valuable
assistance from the Frick Art Reference Library, where the staff was already
engaged in producing cultural maps and atlases. By spring 1944, the ACLS
committee was able to furnish for Army publication detailed maps showing the
locations of cultural monuments in continental Europe, information on looted art
objects, and instructions for salvage and protection of art work to be included
in civil affairs handbooks.6

Inside the government, justice Harlan F. Stone of the US Supreme Court had
asked the President, on 8 December 1942, to create an organization for the protection
and conservation of works of art, monuments, and records in Europe; and in the
spring of 1943 the US government had proposed establishing an Allied agency
for such purposes to the British and the Russians. In August 1943 the President
had appointed Supreme Court Justice Owen J. Roberts chairman of an interdepartmental
committee to be known as the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage
of Artistic and Historic Monuments in Europe. The Roberts Commission, as it
quickly came to be known, took in hand the vast job of assessing in detail the
extent of German and other Axis appropriation of cultural property and acted
as the Army's channel to museums and universities for information and for personnel.7

By early 1943 the War Department, too, had recognized the desirability of
protecting European art and monuments from war damage. On 1 April General
Wickersham, Director of the School of Military

[54]

Government, writing to the Acting Director, Civil Affairs Division,
recommended commissioning several art experts and, after they had taken the
course at Charlottesville, attaching one or two as advisers to each theater
commander's staff. In July, Hilldring had reported to McCloy that the directive
for the Sicilian landing contained a reference to the preservation of historic
monuments and that Eisenhower had been given two experts as staff advisers and
had been supplied with all the material the ACLS Committee on Protection of
Cultural Treasures in War Areas had so far completed. By the fall of 1943, the
protection of art treasures "to the fullest extent consistent with military
operations" had become established War Department policy; and in April 1944,
Col. Henry C. Newton, an architect in civilian life, was brought into the Civil
Affairs Division to set up procedures for putting the War Department policy and
the work for the civilian groups into effect.8

Overseas, the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Subcommission
(MF A&A ) had readily found a place in civil affairs, first in AMGOT and later, on the
COSSAC staff. Determining its functions, however, was a more difficult matter,
one which would never be completely settled. Within civil affairs, MFA&A was
an anomaly in that it was basically less concerned with the affairs of civilians
than with the actions of its own troops.

In Sicily and Italy and as projected in COSSAC's Standard Policy and
Procedure, the MFA&A mission was to protect historic buildings and art work
against wanton damage and looting but to do so without encroaching on the troop
commander's overriding concerns where the outcome of a battle or his troops'
lives and welfare in or out of combat were at stake. A line between avoidable and
unavoidable damage was impossible to draw since each case could ultimately be
judged only by one man, the commander on the spot. Consequently, beyond what
could be accomplished by advice and persuasion, MFA&A on its own authority could
do little in the way of active protection. Most often it could not begin to
function until after the most crucial time had passed. Although even then, no
doubt, much could often still be done to prevent further damage, the MFA&A role
tended to become less that of a guardian than of an insurance adjustor assessing
the loss, looking for what was salvageable, and attempting to forestall
unwarranted claims. Late in December 1943, shortly before he left the
Mediterranean, Eisenhower had undertaken to strengthen the preventive and
protective aspect of MFA&A by directing higher commanders to determine the
locations of historic monuments ahead of and behind their lines and to keep in
mind and impress on their subordinates that the term "military necessity" did
not embrace military or personal convenience.9
Although he required only compliance with the spirit of the directive,
Eisenhower ordered separately on the same day that no building listed as a work
of art in the zone handbooks on Italy was to be used for military purposes
without his or the 15 Army Group commander's permission in each case.10

MFA&A in SHAEF, after a somewhat uncertain start in COSSAC (the first
American art expert to arrive was sent down to Shrivenham to be a librarian
because he did not possess enough military rank), began its existence with two
modest

[55]

advantages: it was better situated within the military chain of command, at
least theoretically, than it had been in the Mediterranean where, with the rest
of civil affairs, it was completely separate; and it could assume from the
outset that the tenor of Eisenhower's December directive for Italy would also
apply in northern Europe. In January, Professor Geoffrey Webb, Slade Professor
of Fine Arts at Cambridge University, became the semiofficial MFA&A adviser to
the Supreme Commander pending his confirmation as civilian adviser and
subsequent appointment as lieutenant colonel and section chief. The MFA&A
functions that he proposed were to protect monuments and art work from avoidable
loss or damage, prevent their deterioration after combat, and collect evidence
on German looting or desecration. The civil affairs instructions for OVERLORD,
issued in February, confirmed these duties and added requirements for protecting
Allied governments from false claims and Allied troops from slanderous
accusations. To execute its missions, MFA&A was to have four officers attached
to each army, one at army headquarters and three with the frontline troops. The
chief would further maintain a pool of eight officers at SHAEF. Since experience
had demonstrated that without some weight of rank MFA&A officers were helpless,
the chief was to be a lieutenant colonel and the other officers majors. To avoid
immobility, which had long beset MFA&A in the Mediterranean, the section would
have three jeeps and a truck of its own.11

Compared with the setup in the Mediterranean, the MFA&A organization proposed
for SHAEF appeared almost ideal. As such, unfortunately, it was also to prove unattainable even within the
elaborate SHAEF structure. Military organizations do not easily assimilate
highly specialized, autonomous functions; consequently, for MFA&A within the
military chain the question was still not what was desirable but rather what was
feasible. This situation was true both in personnel and in organization. The
argument that MFA&A officers needed the prestige of rank could not prevail
against the Army's reluctance to grant field grade commissions to art
specialists with no military experience; therefore, what MFA&A received were
captains and lieutenants. While Professor Webb awaited his own confirmation as
civilian adviser, which did not come until 1 April, MFA&A led a shadow existence
within G-5, SHAEF; and the German and French country units in the Special Staff
at Shrivenham set up their own MFA&A subsections which, as Webb at one point
complained, scarcely seemed aware that a policy-making section existed in
G-5.12In the 1 May 1944 G-5 reorganization, MFA&A suffered the ultimate
indignity: it did not appear in the organization chart at all. The omission was
not remedied until nearly a month later when a place was made for it in the
Operations Branch.

For a time in April, MFA&A in northwest Europe even seemed about to be
reduced to the impotence it had experienced during the early months in Italy.
When the Governmental Affairs Branch, Special Staff, recommended issuing a
letter and a general order similar to those Eisenhower had put out in Italy in
December 1943, G-5 Operations objected on the ground that existing civil affairs
instructions pro-

Although, as the end of the planning period approached, MF A&A had still
not found a secure position in the command structure, it did at the last minute
find strong support at least for its purpose. Over all objections, Webb had
insisted that an order on art and monuments from the Supreme Commander, not
merely instructions to civil affairs officers, was necessary in northwestern
Europe where initially the British and American troops would be fighting on
friendly territory. In May, Colonel Newton of the Civil Affairs Division, at
the time the War Department's candidate ultimately to become military chief
of SHAEF's MFA&A, visited the theater. Although Newton did not get the appointment,
he took a strong and somewhat influential interest in assuring MFA&A's effectiveness
and supported Webb's stand. Moreover, on 15 February, US bombers in Italy had
unloaded six hundred tons of bombs on the monastery at Monte Cassino, one of
the oldest and most venerated historical structures in Europe. The Allied command
considered military necessity proven beyond question, but the prospect of more
such instances in the future pointed up the need for a firm policy. On 26 May,
Eisenhower addressed a letter to the army group, naval, and air commanders for
OVERLORD. In it he made every commander responsible for protecting and respecting
the historical monuments and cultural centers "which symbolize to the world
all we are fighting for." Where success of the military operation would
be prejudiced, as at Cassino, military necessity would prevail even if it meant
the destruction of some honored site. But in the many instances where damage
and destruction could not be justified, commanders would be responsible for
preserving objects of historical and cultural significance.14In the second week of June, SHAEF dispatched official lists of monuments
together with atlases to the army groups for distribution down to the divisions.

Although planning for Germany was excluded from the COSSAC's range of civil
affairs competence, Morgan's staff had been aware that a sharp division between
the end of the military phase of OVERLORD-RANKIN and the beginning of the
occupation proper would not be possible. In December 1043, Lumley had detailed
Lt. Col. Sir T. St. Vincent Troubridge to study the German administrative system
and determine how it could be adapted to the initiation of military government
in Germany. Completed in January 1944 and thereafter referred to as Slash 100,
taken from its file number, the Troubridge study looked at the transition from
war to occupation as a process rather than as a single event conditional on the
German surrender.15From Slash 100, SHAEF derived both the requirement for and
the limits of its participation in the occupation of Germany. These aspects were
expressed in terms of three phases: a military phase of complete military
government either set up before

[57]

the German final collapse or necessitated by chaotic conditions in Germany
after the surrender; a transitional middle phase in which the military command
would pass its authority to a control commission; and a final phase in which the
occupation would assume permanent form.16On this basis the Supreme Commander
could assume that he would have a military government mission in Germany before
the surrender and for an indeterminate period thereafter.

The Supreme Commander could assume that he had a mission but
not much more. Responsibility for launching the occupation would probably be
his, but its nature and purposes were almost totally unknown. The second and
third phases, as Slash 100 pointed out, depended on political decisions which
had not yet been made. This deficiency loomed large as soon as G-5 moved into
the planning for the first phase. On 10 February, Smith laid the problem before
the CCAC (Combined Civil Affairs Committee). SHAEF, he said, was beginning to
plan for military government in Germany, recognizing that its direct concern was
only with the first phase, but such SHAEF decisions could affect the whole
occupation machinery. Therefore, the first phase policies ought to be attuned
from the start to those of the other two phases. To accomplish this, SHAEF
needed political and economic guidelines.
17

Smith did not know it, but he had asked the impossible. There was no agency
that could give him what he wanted nor would there be one for the duration of
SHAEF's existence. The first impulse in the CCAC was to put Smith off with an
assurance that the major policy decisions could be expected from the European
Advisory Commission (EAC) in due time.18To do so, however, would have amounted to CCAC's abdicating its function
as the source of combined civil affairs policy as far as Germany was concerned.
Furthermore, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff had independently arrived at an estimate
of the way the occupation would be imposed on Germany that coincided with the
SHAEF view derived from Slash 100; consequently, as far as the US staff was
concerned, Smith's request was highly pertinent.19The JCS, therefore, agreed that SHAEF would most likely have to establish
military government in Germany and maintain it for what "could be considerable
length of time" after the capitulation. Hilldring sent this information
to Smith on 22 February.20

However, as Supreme Commander, Eisenhower was under the CCS not the JCS, and
his instructions would have to come through the CCS in order to be valid. In the
CCAC, the British members proposed, not unexpectedly but nevertheless
disquietingly for the Americans, that the questions Smith had raised be referred
to the CCAC (L) , which could secure opinions directly from the EAC.21Thereafter, for both the British and the Americans the issue became one of
supplying an adequate answer to Smith without prejudicing either Washington's or
London's claim to be the fountainhead of occupation policy. In a meeting on 9
March, Hilldring advanced

[58]

the thought that the EAC, as a negotiating body for the governments, would
not be much help as a source for informal judgments and advice; he stated that
the Civil Affairs Division (CAD) was already well along in drafting basic
directives for Germany which ought soon to be expanded into detailed directives.
Four days later the British representatives suggested issuing an interim
directive to take effect before the EAC completed its work, the details being
left to the CCAC (L).22

In a meeting on 19 March, McCloy asserted that the military could not wait
for the EAC to act. A military directive would have to be prepared beforehand
and the necessity for it would have to be made clear to the British and Soviet
governments. Hilldring added that, as a matter of fact, the CAD had completed
a draft of a basic directive which it would submit for British approval and
for expansion in detail by the CCAC (L). Alarmed at the broad hint in McCloy's
remarks that the Americans were ready to ignore the EAC entirely, the British
conceded that since the Russians probably had their own prepared directives
for fringe areas such as Estonia and East Prussia, the Americans and British
could probably do the same, "having in mind the recommendations being put
forward by the US and U.K. representatives on the EAC."
23Having reached an agreement, which as usual was open to disparate
interpretation, the CCAC finally sent a reply to Smith telling him a directive
for Germany was being prepared.
24

Another six weeks passed before the directive reached Eisenhower by special
air courier on 28 April as "CCS 551," because it first had to be transmitted to
London for British review and approval. At British insistence the scope was
limited specifically to the period before the German defeat or surrender to
avoid infringing on the competence of the London-based EAC. In the meantime,
working parties in the CCAC had prepared supplementary political, financial, and
economic and relief guides.

The basic directive was Eisenhower's charter to establish military government
in whatever parts of Germany his forces occupied. As Supreme Commander he would
have the supreme executive, legislative, and judicial authority which he could
delegate as necessary to his subordinate commanders. Military government
administration, however, would be identical throughout the occupied parts of
Germany.25

A political guide, sent with the directive, stated that military government
was to be "firm . . . at the same time just and humane with regard to the
civilian population as far as consistent with strict military requirements." The
purposes were to be to assist continuing military operations, to destroy nazism
and fascism, to maintain law and order, and to restore normal conditions in the
population as soon as possible.26

Financial and economic; and relief guides reached SHAEF on 31 May. The first
provided for tight control of German banking and currency and for the introduction
of Allied military marks as occupation currency. The Allied military marks were
to be used in Germany by the US, British, and Soviet forces, each country redeeming

[59]

them in its national currency for its own troops. The Germans would continue
to use the Reichsmark and would only be able to exchange Allied military marks
for Reichsmarks.

The US Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington had made plates for the
Allied military marks earlier in the year and had begun printing for all three
governments when the Soviet Union demanded it be given duplicate plates from
which to do its own printing. The Soviet government had explained, with almost
disarming candor, that it wanted to do its own printing to be sure of having
a constant supply of marks available. Neither the Americans nor the British
had openly raised the obvious objection to putting duplicate plates in Soviet
hands, namely, the lack of control over the amounts printed; but the British
had argued against relinquishing the plates on the ground that the whole issue
might be discredited because of the unlikelihood of the Russians' being able
to produce identical notes even from duplicate plates, which in fact proved
fortunately true. For both the British and the Americans, however, the real
dilemma was whether or not they wanted to see a separate Soviet occupation currency
introduced into Germany, a move which the Russians threatened to make if they
were not given the plates. To avoid such a development and its implications
for projected Allied unity in the occupation, the duplicate plates had been
made and sent.27

The economic and relief guide combined two marginally related subjects in one
paper. The economic part gave Eisenhower full control over German industrial
production which he was instructed to use to orient German industry toward helping
the war against Japan, to convert industry not needed against Japan to peacetime
production, to make goods available for restitution and reparations, and to
integrate the German economy into the European and world economies. With regard
to relief, the guide specified that critical German shortages were to be
alleviated only to the minimum extent necessary to prevent disease and unrest.
Excess German food and other commodities were to be used for relief in liberated
countries.28 After
he received the guide, Eisenhower pointed out that it assumed a surplus in
Germany but made no provision in the event the assumption proved wrong. The CCAC
then revised the guide and empowered him to plan for relief in Germany on the
same scale as in liberated countries, except that if supplies proved inadequate,
Germany as the enemy country would receive the lesser share.29

Although the directive and the guides categorically disclaimed any purpose
beyond providing Eisenhower with a basis for conducting military government in
areas he might occupy before the surrender, they were obviously conceived as
being readily convertible to final policy statements. They were firm, even
severe, on specifics but on the whole remarkably moderate. Although the
elimination of nazism and of the German ability to make war were assumed, the
mission would be to restore normal conditions and to recreate a peaceable
Germany. The authors had learned Colonel Hunt's lessons well, but The Hunt
Report

[60]

had been absorbed only into Army doctrine, not into United States high
policy. Elsewhere, specifically in the White House, other lessons were being
drawn from the two world wars.

Eisenhower and Smith had been troubled since the inception of SHAEF by the
unconditional surrender formula. In April, when Under Secretary of State Edward
R. Stettinius, Jr., visited London, they asked for a clarification, an
announcement of principles on which the treatment of defeated Germany would be
based, in order to "create a mood of acceptance of unconditional surrender in
the German Army." They proposed a political directive similar in tenor to CCS
551 then being drafted in the CCAC, one that would differentiate between the
crimes of nazism and militarism and the German people's desire for a tolerable
future.30 Stettinius took the request to the President who declared himself
open-minded but inquired how Eisenhower imagined he could back up any promise to
the Germans that they would be treated humanely when he would have to be
speaking also for the Russians, the Norwegians, and all the other peoples who
had suffered in the war and would not be inclined "to be soft."
31Actually, the
President had a month before flatly rejected a similar proposal from the JCS.32
He had said then: "The trouble is that the reasoning . . . presupposes
reconstituting a German state which would give active co-operation apparently at
once to peace in Europe. A somewhat long study and personal experience in and
out of Germany leads me to believe that the Germany philosophy cannot be changed
by decree, law, or military order. The change in German philosophy must be
evolutionary and may take two generations. To assume otherwise is to assume, of
necessity, a period of quiet followed by a third world war." 33